Sunbelt Conference, Edinburgh, 2024
Social & Public Health Sciences Unit, University of Glasgow
Changing health behaviours amongst young people
Declining alcohol and tobacco consumption
Growing prevalence of poor mental health
Have patterns of peer level clustering of health behaviours changed?
Do the same relationships between network structure and health behaviours observed in older datasets occur in a contemporary Scottish adolescent population?
| Net4Health | Peers and Levels of Stress (PaLS) |
|---|---|
| 2022/23 | 2005/6 |
| Cross-sectional (wave 1 of longitudinal study) | Cross-sectional |
| 4 secondary schools + pilot school | 22 schools |
| Secondary 2 (age 12-13) and Secondary 4 (age 14-15) | Secondary 4 only (age 14-15) |
| Online survey | Pen & paper |
Dependent variables:
General mental health (GHQ-12 caseness)
Self-esteem (Rosenberg scale, binarised)
Smoking (monthly or more often)
Drinking (weekly or more often)
Drugs (used this year)
Individual attributes:
Gender
Family affluence (FAS)
Parental care, parental control (Bonding Instrument BF)
Network ties
Net4Health:
Asked to nominate up to ten friends.
Two year-group networks per school = 10 networks.
PaLS:
Asked to nominate up to six friends.
22 networks.
We used autologistic actor-attribute models1 (ALAAMs) to examine how the behaviour (nodal attribute) of an individual is related to their position in a social network and by the behaviours/attributes of other actors in that network.
ALAAMs are an extension of ERGMs.
Can be interpreted similarly to a logistic regression, but taking into account network dependencies.
Sometimes called social influence models.2
Missing data
ALAAMs
Meta-analysis
A couple of caveats…
These are the results from a single imputation
Only structural parameters included so far (‘model A’)
Work in progress!
Some evidence for peer-level clustering of health-related behaviours
Poor mental health was not strongly related to network structure at either time-period
Despite changing prevalence and societal contexts of health-related behaviours, network dependencies do not differ greatly between the time-periods
Questions:
d.lewis.1@research.gla.ac.uk
srebrenka.letina@glasgow.ac.uk